MA10 Sweet Myth-tery of Life Read Online Free Page B

hands together like a blowfly, “what would you like to address first? Perhaps we could discuss our overall approach and strategy over lunch?”
    “Umm ...” I said intelligently.
    The horrible truth was that, now that I was actually confronted by Grimble and his paper mountains, I didn’t have the foggiest notion of how to proceed.
    “Actually, Grimble,” Bunny said stepping forward, “before we think about lunch, I’d like to see your Operating Plan for the current year, the calendarized version, as well as the P and L’s and Financial Statements for the last few months ... oh yes, and your Cash Flow Analysis, both the projections and the actuals, if you don’t mind.”
    The Chancellor blanched slightly and swallowed hard.
    “Certainly, I ... of course,” he said, giving Bunny a look which was notably more respectful than his earlier attentions. “I’ll get those for you right now.”
    He scuttled off to confer with a couple of his underlings, all the while glancing nervously back at our little group.
    I caught Aahz’s eye and raised an eyebrow, which he responded to with a grimace and a shrug. It was nice to know my partner was as much in the dark as I was regarding Bunny’s requests.
    “Here we are,” Grimble said, returning with a fistful of paper which he passed to Bunny. “I’ll have the Cash Flow for you in a moment, but you can get started with these.”
    Bunny grunted something non-committal, and began leafing through the sheets, pausing to scrutinize each page intently. More for show than anything, I eased over to where I could look over her shoulder. In no time flat, my keen eye could tell without a doubt that the pages were filled with rows and columns of numbers. Terrific.
    “Um ... I do have some spread sheets to support some of those figures if you’d like to see them,” Grimble supplied uneasily.
    Bunny paused in her examinations to favor him with a dark glance.
    “Maybe later, she said. “I mean, you do know the origin of spread sheets, don’t you?”
    “Umm ...” the Chancellor hedged.
    “They were named after the skins used by trappers,” Bunny continued with a faint smile. “You know, the things they dragged after them to hide their tracks?”
    For a moment Grimble stared at her, bewildered, and then he gave a sudden bark of laughter, slapping her playfully on the shoulder.
    “That’s good!” he exclaimed. “I’ll have to remember that one.”
    I glanced at Aahz.
    “Accountant humor, I guess,” he said with a grimace. “Incomprehensible to mere mortals. You know, like ‘We’ll make it up on volume’ jokes?”
    “Now that’s not funny,” Grimble corrected with mock severity. “We’ve had that line dumped on us all too often ... in complete sincerity. Right Bunny?”
    I couldn’t help but notice that he was now treating Bunny with the deference of a colleague. Apparently her joke, however nonsensical it had been to me, had convinced the Chancellor that she was more than my arm ornament.
    “Too true,” my ‘assistant’ said. “But seriously, Grimble, getting back to the problem at hand, we’re going to need complete, non-camouflaged figures if we’re going to get the kingdoms finances back on course. I know the tradition is to pretty things up with charts and studies of historic trends, but since we’ll be working with insiders only, just this once let’s try it with hard, cold data.”
    It sounded like a reasonable request to me, but the Chancellor seemed to think it was a radical proposal … and not a particularly wise one, at that.
    “I don’t know, Bunny,” he said, shooting a look at Aahz and me one normally reserves for spies and traitors. “I mean, you know how it is. Even though we usually get cast as the villains of bureaucracy, we don’t have any real power to implement change. All we do is make recommendations to those who can change things. If we don’t sugarcoat our recommendations, or slant them so they’re in line with what the